in Chuzzlewit"), worked generally side by
side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a
waterman. Poll Green's father had the additional distinction of being
a fireman, and was employed at Drury Lane Theatre, where another
relation of Poll's, I think his little sister, did imps in the
pantomimes.

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my
happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a
learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. The deep
remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless;
of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young
heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and
delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing
away from me, never to be brought back any more, cannot be written. My
whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such
considerations that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often
forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I
am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the
scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know
that if a shilling or so were given me by any one, I spent it in a
dinner or a tea. I know that I worked, from morning to night, with
common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but
ineffectually, not to anticipate my money, and to make it last the week
through; by putting it away in a drawer I had in the counting-house,
wrapped into six little parcels, each parcel containing the same
amount, and labelled with a different day. I know that I have lounged
about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know
that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care
that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.

A LITTLE GENTLEMAN

But I held some station at the blacking warehouse, too. Besides that
my relative at the counting-house did what a man so occupied, and
dealing with a thing so anomalous, could, to treat me as one upon a
different footing from the rest, I never said, to man or boy, how it
was that I came to be there, or gave the least indication of being
sorry that I was there. That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered